Thanatos | Geoffrey Thanatos (apeacefuldeath) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-12-16 09:40:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | thanatos |
Who: Thanatos (apeacefuldeath); special guest appearance by Hades (ofdiss)
What: Prioritizing.
When: Early December.
Where: NYC.
Warnings: None.
Hospitals, noise and movement and frenetic paces, shouting to be heard above the shouts, the wailing wounded and screaming ambulances. Not his domain, but not not his domain, he'd stepped light-footed through more than one emergency room during his many days. Still, the ER was not Death's preferred place; he gravitated toward intensive care and cancer wards, recovery rooms where post-op patients slept soundly with the help of sedatives bearing his brother's name. Thanatos, the peaceful killer, was deeply fond of hospitals.
He treated this one much like an old friend, ghosting through its halls to run fingertips along painted walls (calm colors: greens and blues and bieges which said 'there is nothing to be afraid of, death is not coming for you'), occasionally stopping at an open door to study a room's occupant with blank, dead hawk's eyes. They were each sand in an hourglass to him, little falling grains which he sensed and he felt, this child of Night and Darkness, but had over time become unable to touch. Thus the madness. Thus the reason for his presence in this place not of healing but merely extended dying. Thanatos ghosted through the hospital in an almost literal sense; faded old thing amidst non-believers, the quiet guardian of slipping away during sleep now a junkyard dog which bared its teeth, which threatened violence but only toward those within reach of its tether. No one knew him, and so next to no one saw him.
The mortals were almost entirely lost to sword-wielding Death. His fellow gods were another thing -- they'd been his even during their glory days, when Greece was the world, men were small, and feared and loathed Thanatos just as surely as the gods themselves did. Immortal did not mean invincible, invulnerable. With Olympus gone and Dis so much dust, the Christ-child and its mockeries of sacrifice high on the mountain these sick and sour days, Thanatos counted on gods for sustenance. The forgotten were his bread, the weak his wine; tall, spindly Death trailed after them like a hungry spectre. But patient, oh so achingly patient, knowing that those he'd send away would not require a psychopomp. They would not pass through his once-King and Queen's hands for judgment. There would be no Elysium or Tartarus for them. Just the void. Just the bitter blackness of mortality at last.
Thanatos stood at the foot of Hades's hospital bed and thought on this, fingers twitching for the blade beneath his coat. He studied a face gone pale with hurt and drugs, cocked his head with its own knife's-edge features and contemplated taking the King of Death, what it might entail. In the end, he did nothing. Hades and the sad frailty he wore so well was nostalgia, a stop on the road to other things. There was a method to the madness, after all, an order which needed to be followed within the larger scope of chaos. Thanatos, then, stood and listened to the sound of a god's heart beating, one lunatic sitting in on another.